After a bit of quiet over here at CMLL, we’re getting ready for an active spring. We are finalizing our spring brownbags and speaker series and will be posting details shortly. Suffice it to say that we’ll be immersed dialogue about language policy, after-school literacy experiences, and more!

Another note: this year’s International Literacy Association Conference is coming up soon and the theme is Culinary Linguistics, to be held at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York, March 11-13, 2016. From the CFP:

Recently, much attention has been given to the idea of the language of food in the media and among linguists and other scholars across the disciplines. In addition, a number of books concerning this topic have been published in the last three years. Authors analyze food from various angles such as the linguistic history of culinary terms; the linguistics of food advertising and culinary arts programs; the linguistic components of recipes, menus, labels, restaurant reviews; the discourse of food production and consumption; and the comparison of cooking and dining practices across cultures. The ILA invites submissions that explore these and other connections between linguistics and food.

CMLL is thrilled to help sponsor ILA’s Annual Conference. This year’s theme, “Linguistics and Education,” is a perfect match for current ILA president Jo Anne Kleifgen, who is also one of the founders of CMLL. See below for more information about this year’s conference.

On the occasion of the 60th Annual Conference of the International Linguistic Association, we pay special tribute to Franklin Horowitz, who has been an active and dedicated member of the ILA from its earliest years, serving both as an ongoing member of the Executive Board and as ILA’s president from 1999 to 2002. A professor of linguistics at Teachers College, Columbia University for over 35 years, Frank’s enthusiasm for language inspired legions of students, who continue the work of teaching linguistics to their own students around the world. His influence has been enormous, both as a leader of the ILA and as a teacher. Thus, this year’s theme reflects the mark he has left on those who have worked with and learned from him.

Plenary Speakers

Ellen Bialystok, York University

William Labov, University of Pennsylvania

Raymond McDermott, Stanford University

Jacob Mey, University of Southern Denmark

Invited Panels

WORD Global Roundtable. On the occasion of the re-launch of WORD, journal of the ILA, Teachers College, Columbia University and Beijing Normal University will host a simulcast roundtable co-chaired by WORD‘s managing editor Jonathan J. Webster and ILA’s president, Jo Anne Kleifgen. Our panelists will be Sheila Embleton, Michael Halliday, Ruqaiya Hasan, William Labov, and Jacob Mey.

Rethinking the Relationship between Linguistics and Education. Betsy Rymes, Andrea Leone, Mark Lewis andNelson Flores of the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate school of Education, will explore themes in language research in education.

Workshops for Teachers

The Writers’ Sentence: From Casual to Formal Writing. Alice Deakins of William Paterson University and colleagues will present four increasingly complex levels of the English sentence, including both grammatical conventions and stylistic power. At each level, the structure of the sentence will be discussed followed by practice in a game format.

Having Fun with Words. Kate Parry of Hunter College, CUNY and colleagues will focus on the problem of learning infrequently encountered vocabulary. Participants will engage in games or exercises requiring interactive discussion about the selected words. Materials that teachers can use with their students will be provided.

Kate Pahl, our CMLL Visiting Scholar, will be in residence at Teachers College this month, April 13th – 15th. There will be several opportunities for anyone interested to learn more about her work. Kate Pahl is Professor of Literacies in Education at the University of Sheffield. She is the author of ‘Materializing literacies: The uses of literacy revisited’ (Bloomsbury 2014).

During her visit, Dr. Pahl will join us for the Multimodality Study Group – April 14th, 12-1:30p, Room: TBA

Additional opportunities to meet with Dr. Pahl will be posted as they are finalized.

On April 14th, she will present in our Speaker Series: Co-producing literacies: ways of knowing in communities.Time: 6:00p (reception at 5:30p)
Room: 152 Horace MannRSVP

This presentation will describe a collaborative ethnographic research project that is currently underway in Rotherham with a focus on ‘Imagining better communities and making them happen’ funded by the ESRC through the Connected Communities programme. At the heart of the project is an exploration of how different ways of knowing or ‘unknowing’ (Vasudevan 2011) can inform understandings of community literacy practices. Drawing on the concept of ‘materializing literacies’ as a touchstone for generative research, this presentation will describe different understandings of literacy in communities.These ways of knowing incorporate textiles, art-work, images, oral stories and draw on the magical spaces of the everyday. This presentation will re-think the way literacies are conceived and understood through collaborative ethnographic research with girls and women, using literary and post-colonial theory. By bringing together a hermeneutic understanding of the social, drawing on post- colonial literary texts, a complex picture of literacy as meshed with ‘the fabric of our lives’ will be presented. This presentation draws on Pahl (2014) – an approach to literacy that combined multimodality with aesthetic and literary theory together with the New Literacy Studies to re-think how literacy is understood within multilingual community contexts.

What are the challenges that researchers face when developing responsive research working with marginalized communities? On March 5th, Professor Arshad Ali visited Teachers College as part of theCenter for Multiple Languages and Literacies Speaker Series, to discuss his research project working with muslim youth and how they make sense of surveillance in multiple spaces in their lives. His qualitative approach to understand these processes aimed to engage with a community following the traditions of a participatory research methodology.

Professor Ali offered a detailed analysis of the ways in which the threat of surveillance permeates multiple spaces for young people, and how it impacts their own sense of identity and citizenship. He also questioned the long-term implications of these threats, particularly within educational contexts, for muslim youth.

Throughout his presentation, Professor Ali posited the importance of developing research methodologies that can be beneficial for marginalized communities and that can challenge hegemonic understandings of these communities within academic institutions.

The CMLL team appreciates the participation of the attendees, and Professor Arshad Ali, who generously shared his academic inquiries with us.

Professor Arshad Ali, from George Washington University, will be joining us on March 5th to speak about his research, which explores how marginalized young people make sense of their own identity and agency in an era in which state-sanctioned surveillance is part of their lives.

His talk is titled “Citizens Under Suspicion: Responsive Research with Community Under Surveillance”

Please note: The fireside chat will take place in a different room than the talk.

In the 14 years since the 9/11 events, this nation as a whole, and New York City in particular, has escalated its state-sanctioned surveillance in the lives and activities of Muslims in the United States. In this talk, Dr. Ali will explores the ramifications of police infiltration and monitoring of Muslim student and community-based organizations. Drawing upon 24 months of ethnographic fieldwork among multiple research sites with Muslim youth in New York City, he examines how surveillance affected the relationships within communities utilizing notions of power, panoptic gaze and governmentality. Throughout the participatory action ethnographic study he found that an insidious result of the New York Police Department’s Demographics Unit has been the alarming rise of self-discipline behaviors amid a culture of fear and panoptic gaze, as well as diminished intercommunity trust and sense of solidarity among these youth themselves. Through the participatory action research process of data collection and analysis, these findings point to a need to reconfigure the roles and responsibilities of a social researcher.

Prof. Amy Stornaiuolo, Assistant Professor in the Reading/Writing/Literacy Division at Penn GSE, will be joining us on Thursday, Feb. 5th when she will present research that explores the intersections of communicative practices, social networks, and adolescents. The title of her talk is, “Exploring Social Reading: Adolescents’ Literacy Practices in Socially Networked Spaces.”

Date: Thursday, February 5, 2015
Time: 7:30-9:00p
Room: 277 GDH

Light refreshments will be served.

Prior to her talk, Prof. Stornaiuolo will be available for a fireside chat with any graduate students who are interested in speaking with her. This will take place in (Room: TBA — check back here or email Cristina for details: cps2127@tc.columbia.edu)

Welcome back and Happy new year! We had a great start to the academic year, with the screening of “Unequal Education” (co-sponsored with the Media and Social Change Lab) and our inaugural meeting of the multimodality study study. It was wonderful to meet some new people last semester and we hope to continue to grow our reach within and beyond TC.

Finally, the special announcement: Please note that the deadline for the Call for Papers for this year’s International Linguistics Association Conference — to be held at Teachers College in April! — has been extended to January 31st. See the following note from ILA President (and CMLL co-founder) Jo Anne Kleifgen:

Below is our second Call for Papers for the 60th Annual Conference of the ILA.

We have a date for our first study group meeting! Thursday, Dec. 11th, 10:00a – 12:00p. We’ll use this first gathering as a chance to share ideas and see where our understandings of multimodality are rooted. This will also be an opportunity to propose texts for us to read/view over the course of the next several months.

To start us off, I’ll bring a couple of very short texts for us to read and view together as a way to spark our conversation.

During the 14-15 academic year, CMLL will launch a new study group that will gather faculty and students from across Teachers College who are interested in reading and discussing texts in the area of multimodality. We hope to address multimodality from a variety of perspectives and, in doing so, to engage with a wide range of texts and disciplines. Below, we’ve listed a few recent articles and books that take up the topic as both a point of departure and a framing lens for analysis. As the study group gets underway, we’ll share additional texts and related resources.